


Abdâgu Ubdâgu

by StalwartNavigator (Fallwater023)



Series: The Music-Makers [1]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse of Khuzdul, Badass Dwarf Women, Bisexual Kíli, Bisexuality, Coming of Age, Dancing and Singing, Demisexual Fíli, Demisexuality, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Dwarf Fashion, Dwarf Gender Concepts, Dwarf Women, Family Dynamics, Female Dwalin, Female Fíli, Female Kíli, Gen, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Genderbending, Heteronormativity, I'm sorry professor, Inheritance, Kinda, Languages and Linguistics, Music, Poetry, Royalty, Sexism, Sisters, Trans Character, Worldbuilding, dwarf religion, sort of, this is not a perfect world
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 22:35:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3954376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallwater023/pseuds/StalwartNavigator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When Fili was born, the refugees danced in the streets of Ered Luin and flooded the temple courts to praise Mahal.</p><p>When Kili was born, the refugee quarter erupted with joy. </p><p>Then Kili came of age, and the temple sent for them."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Abdâgu Ubdâgu

**Author's Note:**

> Oh god aNOTHER AU SOMEBODY STOP ME
> 
> The singers in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP9bn-gcXhQ fit my mental image of fem!Fili and fem!Kili perfectly, albeit sans beards. Soooo this is my take on a world where dwarf women are desperately rare and the Line of Durin ends in a pair of daughters. 
> 
> To clarify before we begin: Fíli and Kíli engage in some gender-nonconforming behavior as heiresses to a traditionally male title, but identify as cis dwarrowdams. They present as masculine of center given their family’s pressure and general reasons of practicality, but given their druthers are as likely to wear female-coded clothing as not.
> 
> If I've formatted this correctly there should also be mouseover translations for my Frankenstein Khuzdul. Many thanks to The Dwarrow Scholar's Neo-Khuzdul dictionary. Any errors are entirely my own.

_"We are the music-makers_  
and we are the dreamers of dreams,  
...  
World-losers and world-forsakers  
On whom the pale moon gleams." 

When Fili was born, the refugees danced in the streets of Ered Luin and flooded the temple courts to praise Mahal. It seemed like a precious, impossible miracle: a daughter born to the line of Durin, in the wake of ‘Azanulbizar. Some nobles muttered about the line of inheritance, but another daughter of Durin to mother heirs was another layer of security between King Thorin and the end of his line. Princess Fili was given the thank-offerings of a people in exile. If she had been born in the halls of Erebor, she would have had gold and silver and mithril, gems of all colors. Here, she was gifted carven wood and stone, and the vigilant protection of her people. The first daughter born to Erebor-in-exile became the daughter of every Ereborean mother. 

Fili remembers those days, vaguely. She remembers an endless array of aunties and uncles. The way even the grimmest guardsman or most tightfisted merchant would melt and smile at her when she ran by. She remembers every boy in the neighborhood protecting her from the teasing of Ered Luiner merchant girls, who wore flashy jewels and teased her for having not even a quartz pin to her name. 

When Kili was born, the refugee quarter erupted with joy. Dwarrow laid flowers and the coats off their backs under Dis’s feet as she passed in the street; no mother had been so blessed since the days of Durin III. Fili remembers holding her baby sister at her naming ceremony, and the priest crying at the sight. 

As princesses in exile, they had an unusual childhood. At their mother’s feet they learned Khuzdul and Iglishmêk, the songs and dances of their mother’s house, and all the skills needed to run a household. But they also learned Westron and Sindarin at the feet of their Uncle Balin, and courtly manners at the feet of their Uncle Thorin, and (most unusually) warcraft at the feet of their Aunt Dwalin. Miss Dwalin (and it was Miss on the training field, for all trainees were equal) knew something about being a dwarrowdam on the battlefield, and taught them how to lead a dwarf from the front and how to guide him from behind. 

“En’t nobody so blind as a war-chief sometimes, lassie,” she had growled once at Fili, “And sometimes nobody so clear-headed as a dam on the field.” 

They had no crowns nor jewels, but their amad made them tiaras of stiff cloth in the style of Durin II, embroidered in bright colors. Their cloak-brooches and buckles and boot-plates were not the proper soft gold of princesses but the sturdy iron of princes, and no dam of the Elder Line had carried weapons as they did since Durin III’s time. Fili had her _Ijzȇn Id-Dammȃm_ as both a dwarrowdam and a dwarf would, and when her father passed in a tunnel collapse Uncle Thorin wove a _raydȗna’s_ braids into her hair. 

Then Kili came of age, and the temple sent for them. 

Neither princess of the Line of Durin was particularly devout, and while they celebrated the rituals of their people, the Ered Luin temple was not familiar to them. It was a relief when Priestess Kenin met them at the courtyard door. 

“Your highnesses,” she said, with a dignified nod. Kili’s eyes bugged out when she beckoned them into the Cloister, where only the priests and priestesses walked. Fili had to elbow her. Blushing, Kili followed her lead and kicked off her boots before stepping up onto the smooth stone. 

There was an eerie hush in the temple. Carven-crystal lamps held a dim light, but Fili had to open her second eyes to see anything clearly. Priests and priestesses walked by in serene pairs, bowing as the elderly priestess and the young princesses passed them. Kili gawped, taking in the click of stone tablets and the swish of robe on flagstone; Fili took her arm in a sisterly gesture and steered her with an iron grip. 

Priestess Kenin bowed as they passed the Deep Well. Remembering her lore, Fili bowed as well, dragging Kili down with her. This was probably the closest she would get to the Sacred Stone in her life; dimly she could feel the stir of the earth’s deep forces from the bottom of the Well. 

And at long last they came to the Priestess’s office, where she plunked down a weighty tome on the low table. Dust plumed up from its surface. 

Fili had seen her first _amrȃgu-ikhjȇm_ when she was six, too young to properly remember, for the birth of her baby sister. Uncle Thorin had given baby Kili the learning-right to the songs and craft of the Durin line, and a mining-right held in trust for her by amad and adad. Later, when Kee was still a baby, there had been a wedding where adad’s udad gave Cousin Gloin some Firebeard songs to pass on to his children. And somehow Uncle Thorin and amad had scraped up enough in gifts to hold one for adad’s passing and then one for Fili’s _izbȇh_ right after. 

This book, the priestess explained, was called the _Nanna’surnȇl_. It was essentially a collection of all the songs, dances, and stories that belonged rightly to a pair of sisters. There wasn’t a proper _amrȃgu-ikhjȇm_ to pass down these songs, for there had not been two sisters of the Line of Durin since the reign of Durin the IV, and none in the Longbeard clan for centuries before that. Families had been lucky to bear one dam in a generation. 

They were to stay in the temple for however long it took them to learn the _Nanna’surnȇl_ front to back, for the good of their people and the future of the line of Durin. Arrangements had been made with Uncle and amad. Most embarrassing of all, the end of their time at the temple would be marked by an _annak-ikhjȇm_ where Fili and Kili would perform some of the sacred dances for the temple elders and nobles of Ered Luin and Erebor-in-exile. 

The priestess’s words echoed hollow in Fili’s ears, like shouting into a mine and waiting for the answer. Kili looked up at her as they were herded into a novices’ cell. 

“Don’t worry, Kee,” she forced herself to grin and clap her sister on the shoulder, “I’m sure it won’t be that bad.” 

She should have kept her slagged mouth shut. 

The next morning began with dawn prayer. While Fili and Kili were not in fact training to be priestesses, they were expected to follow the schedule of temple life; breakfast came after an hour of chant meditation. Fili expected to get cracking on the old book after their meal, but the two were ushered off to Khuzdul school with the other novices. 

Fili’s Khuzdul was, she quickly realized, a mishmash of three different dialects: the Khuzdul her Uncle and amad spoke from the Ereborean high court, the Khuzdul her adad and his family spoke from the Ered Luin mining community, and the Khuzdul everybody else in their neighborhood spoke, which was a mishmash of both with the accents of Ereborean and Ered Luiner peasants. Fili had switched between the three all her life with the ease of changing clothes for dinner, or as a stage actor might switch between accents. Indeed, she had thought of them as accents, and not truly different dialects. Under the stern eye of the temple tutors, Fili now had to parse out which of her Khuzdul was ‘truly Khuzdul’ and which was regional, colloquial, or otherwise corrupted by daily use. 

“I don’t see why it’s corrupt to say _ishmikh_ and not _ishmikhi_ , or to call it an _‘ugyad_ instead of an _‘ukrag_ ,” she whined to Kili a week into this madness. “Shouldn’t it matter more that people understand you than that you use the right words?” 

Kili frowned at her. It would shock amad to know that Kili had finally found something to be serious about - and it was studying temple Khuzdul. Fili thought it an awful waste of time, but her sister loved the intricate nuance and precision of the language. She sighed and returned to puzzling out her _sayiddiyan_ from her _sayiddiya_. 

The Khuzdul was just the start of it. Nobody wore boots in the temple, nor the dresses amad had put Kili and Fili in for temple holidays; the two had to get used to wearing long tunics and trousers again, like children, and each found it strangely intense to feel the holy stone against her bare feet every hour of the day. 

Then there were the other novices. 

To be fair, the priests and priestesses made very little of the fact that princesses dwelled in their midst. They offered the two only the tiniest of nods in passing. But that was more than even the most exalted novice got, and it was more than enough to set tongues wagging. At all public hours, she felt eyes on her _raydȗna’s_ braids and warrior’s posture. Often she caught male novices staring at her sister, and felt like warning them off with a growl; Kili was barely of age, and hadn’t taken a lover yet, though she had gone walking with a few lads from training. She wouldn’t be letting any smooth-talking temple boys take advantage of _her_ namadith. 

At least they hadn’t taken her swords from her, nor the knives she strapped on every morning under the novice tunic. Aunt Dwalin had taught her to always have another _sadhakhd_ to bite with. 

And at least Aunt Dwalin would be pleased with the training she was enduring. She and Kili had three hours a day to keep up their weapons training with the temple guard - after spending six hours dancing themselves breathless and singing themselves hoarse. She could feel the muscle cording her thighs and gut in a way she never had before. 

It was a little unsettling to feel some of those temple-boy eyes following _her_ too. 

To be honest, Fili had never felt a strong pull to court. All the lads in her neighborhood had been her best friends, staunch protectors, and big brothers when she was a child. It felt strange to walk out with any of them, and stranger still to walk out with any dwarf from outside the immigrant quarter. It wasn’t that she preferred dams, or was craftwed, or too shy to ask. She’d just never met someone she liked enough, she supposed. Anyway, she was Uncle’s heir, and might end up in a political match if that ever became important. It was just weird to be reading all this ancient poetry going on about “the little lost beloved” and “he who makes an art of longing”. Perhaps that was why Kili liked temple Khuzdul so much, because she knew from the inside what _Id-Uglabel_ meant when he talked about feeling a _mushgashug_ when his love frowned or smiled. 

It certainly made it easier to reason with Kili. Now that her sister had something to take seriously, it was easier for her to understand when Fili wanted to spend the free evening hour working on knife-throwing or Uncle Balin’s accounting assignments (it was so unfair that they were literally in a Cloister sanctuary and still couldn’t escape night assignments from Uncle Balin). Then again, she also didn’t have the wild lands to tempt her out of the house, and drag Fili with her on some hunting or gathering expedition. 

Fili had avenged a lot of taunts about half-elf fairy princesses in her day. Kili might be a hopeless _bundushathȗr_ , but she was _Fili’s bundushathȗr._

Matters came to a head as they always do: slowly and then all piling down at once. The other novices had developed a habit of spying on their weapons practice - many of them were from merchant families and had _never seen a sparring match,_ Fili couldn’t think of anything more unnatural. At some point they’d given up on subtlety and just sat on the Cloister steps, steadily working their way up from whispering among themselves to cheering and heckling. 

One of the chief offenders, Marteg, seemed particularly young to Fili. To be fair, all the novices seemed young to her with their twittering about lessons and fashions and this or that upcoming festival. All her agemates at home were worrying about the weather, the day’s mine conditions, and whether they would make enough to put food on the table next moon-turn. Perhaps Marteg’s youth was so jarring given his build; she felt a little lurch of homesickness for Aunt Dwalin whenever she saw his tall and broad frame. He didn’t have the crusty layer of time and cruel experience, so the good heart he had in common with her auntie shone through clear as day. He wasn’t the fastest at his runes nor the cleverest with his accent, but Marteg had one leg up on the temple competition. He was musical. Like Aunt Dwalin he had an incongruous love for stringed instruments. Many a time some reveler or another had offered Dwalin a drum when her heart was with the fiddle, and Marteg had a similar gift. With two other musicians he had been tapped to accompany Fili and Kili as they learned. At first he had been shy, but with the passing of days and weeks he grew easy with his smiles and jokes. Fili was happy to count him and Rua and Kharon as friends. 

She and Kili had been seated side-by-side in the study hall, heads together over some declensions, when a yelp heralded somebody being caught daydreaming by the tutors. Fili had been publicly scolded once for doodling knives in the margin of her translation. It always hurt worse to watch somebody else be humiliated than to endure it herself. 

It hurt worse when it was a friend. She recognized Marteg’s voice and kept her head down as the tutor dragged him up. It was Acolyte Shuraf, a particularly sharp-tempered dam with little patience for distracted novices. She had forced Marteg to his feet and thrust his parchment into his hands. 

“Well?” she demanded, “Surely if it’s more important than your work, you can share the fruit of your labors with your fellow students?” 

Marteg flushed to the roots of his hair, and under Acolyte Shuraf’s gimlet eye started to mumble out a phrase. 

“Louder, Novice!” she barked. 

Fili hadn’t thought the poor fellow could flush deeper, but he did. And then he started over, loud and clear, and it was a love poem. 

Oh, dear. She hoped it wasn’t somebody in the room. And she wasn’t sure why people were staring at her - 

And then he started a repeating-verse about _kidzul zentel_ and _lakhdur sadhakhȃd_ , and while a small ridiculous part of Fili’s brain was occupied with the notion that he used the same word for knives that she did and wasn’t that a thought?, the rest of her was bowled over with the realization that _MARTEG’S LOVE POEM WAS ABOUT HER_. 

It would get her a scolding later, if not from Acolyte Shuraf then from any other priest or priestess in the temple, up to and including the High Priestess. Fili didn’t care. She scrambled to her feet and fled the hall. 

The corridors were much less stuffy than the crowded study hall, and she relished the fresh air before succumbing to shivers. Fili sternly told herself that it was the cold, not any flavor of panic, that had her folding her arms and shaking apart at the seams. 

She finally got herself warm after some pacing and shouting at the empty air. Fili was furious. Enraged. Fuming. What right did that lunk have, to just upend her like that, and in front of everybody! She kicked the wall for good measure. It boomed in the empty space. The priests and priestesses held evening prayer for the pious of Ered Luin while the acolytes ruled over the novitiate study halls, leaving even the largest corridors of the Cloister deserted. Good. Fewer witnesses to her humiliation. 

The heir of King Thorin stumbled back to her room.

**Author's Note:**

> OK. This is where I explain myself. The amrȃgu-ikhjȇm is entirely my invention, and is an analogue to the Pacific Northwestern potlatch. If you look up 'potlatch' on Wikipedia you'll find some pretty useful information, but the article doesn't mention the bit that's important to this story: the potlatch system served as a sort of copyright law. At a wedding, a parent of the bride or groom would give the couple the songs and stories they were allowed to perform, and the more guests you invited to the potlatch as witnesses, the stronger the 'copyright' was. I'm not an expert, but the notion that the right to perform a song or story is passed down in a public celebration from person to person is the base for the idea of the amrȃgu-ikhjȇm. 
> 
> I’m headcanonning the Rite of Blood Fili mentions as a combat-oriented ritual for male-identifying dwarves and a healing-oriented ritual for female-identifying dwarves (all dwarves are taught the rudiments of both and more FAAB dwarves are drawn to healing while more MAAB dwarves are drawn to combat. This is in addition to whatever other craft the dwarf in question might take up). Nonbinary, genderfluid, and trans dwarrow usually do both, but that’s not a thing reserved for non-cis dwarrow; Fili does both because of the ‘heiress to a male title’ thing.
> 
> I’m also headcannoning dwarf/dwarves as masculine, dam/dams as feminine, and dwarrow as a gender-neutral/nonbinary label similar to the pronoun ‘they’, referring to a mixed-gender group of dwarrow or to one genderqueer individual. Even if they’re cis, a dwarf/dam/dwarrow will usually tell a human/hobbit/elf/etc to use ‘dwarrow’ because it’s rude to assume a stranger’s gender. Dwarf society isn't perfect but they're working on it.


End file.
